Phoebe on being “the girl”:
…seriously, what the hell is up with that? i’m not five. and considering the nature and subject of the event, one would presume that even the normally pathetically-unaware ydn could think to use non-juvenilizing terminology. like there would ever be a “boy” mentioned in a caption. seriously. yes, i’m insulted…
Amen to that.
Good news from San Francisco:
Private citizens who are illegally searched, arrested or beaten by law enforcement officers can sue the officers and their government employer for damages under a broad California law, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The 1987 law provides for damages of at least $25,000 for violations of constitutional rights as defined by state or federal law. The court, unanimously rejecting Los Angeles County’s argument that the law applied only to acts motivated by bigotry, ruled that it could be used in a suit claiming false arrest and illegal searches by sheriff’s deputies during a June 1998 investigation of alleged auto theft.
The last three protestors held on absurd charges for demonstrating against Philadelphia’s Republican convention have finally been acquitted:
Viveiros’s case was bolstered by a videotape made by protesters showing that not only was he not near Timoney when the presumed assault took place but that he was arrested across the street several moments later, not at the scene as Timoney had previously testified. The video also contradicted testimony by other officers that Viveiros had resisted arrest by punching and kicking them–instead showing officers tackling him and punching him several times as he lay on the ground, unresisting.
“I feel vindicated. This was a victory not only for me individually but for social movements that utilize the street to struggle for justice,” said Viveiros, a housing advocate from Massachusetts, standing outside the courthouse after the trial. The case brings to a close the long ordeal of the more than 400 protesters arrested at the Philadelphia convention–with only a handful convicted of misdemeanors and the rest thrown out or disposed of by fines or probation.
Among the “evidence” recounted to me by ACLU lawyers involved in the cases was use of a tool of conspiracy: a cell phone.
PIRG reminds us (with documentation) that members of Congress aren’t whoring themselves out to industry and working to dismantle regulatory bulwarks between their children and environmental disaster for free.
FAIR slams the pundits for their free advice that Kerry screw his base (people of color, the working class, et al) – and puts it in historical context:
Both Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 took the pundits’ move-to-the-right advice– with little notable success. “Democrats’ Platform Shows a Shift From Liberal Positions of 1976 and 1980” was a New York Times headline in 1984 (7/22/84). The selection of conservative Sen. Lloyd Bentsen as Dukakis’ running mate, wrote David Broder at the time (Washington Post, 7/14/88), “sent an unmistakable message to the activist constituencies of the Democratic Party that the days of litmus-test liberalism are over.” Of course, after both Mondale and Dukakis were defeated in landslides, the conventional wisdom was that they hadn’t moved to the right far enough.
In light of Brown’s new investigation of its ties to slavery the YDN reflects on the continuing controversy over the dark side of the history of this institution and the men after whom its facilities are named, going back to the “Yale, Slavery, and Abolition” report released in 2001:
In what was perhaps the report’s most significant contribution, the authors documented extensive evidence of racist, pro-slavery tendencies in Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph and the man for whom Morse College is named. Morse, the report pointed out, was created in 1962, near the height of the Civil Rights movement.
The Yale administration’s response, as usual, is to discredit criticism of the University on one issue on the grounds that those making it have criticized the University on other issues rather than by reckoning with the facts. That, and an insinuation (well, more than an insinuation) that Yale beats Brown in the reckong-with-historical-connections-to-slavery department:
University President Richard Levin said Yale, unlike Brown, satisfactorily dealt with the issue slavery’s legacy two years ago when the Law School sponsored a conference on the topic. “I think they’re two years behind us,” Levin said.
Not everyone, however, is so blase:
For Owen Williams GRD ’08, a member of the New Haven Reparations Coalition who was present during the conference, the core issue of Yale’s involvement with, and responsibility for, its ties to slavery was never adequately addressed or resolved. “The conference had great intellectual merit, but it was a charade,” Williams said. “The issue of Yale was only discussed once, and very briefly.” Williams has recently completed work on a paper outlining the pro-slavery activity of John Calhoun, for whom Calhoun College was named.
Additional materials from the authors of the report are on-line here.
One step is confronting the entirety of Yale’s historical connection to slavery would be addressing the painting that sits over President Levin’s head in the Corporation room.
And no, this doesn’t count:
“I have to say when I first saw it I scratched my head and wondered what it was doing there,” University President Richard Levin said. “It’s probably worth discussion, but we haven’t had any yet. It’s obviously an artifact from a much different historical era, when people had a different perspective. But it’s certainly not consistent with our thinking today. I’ll grant that without any argument.”
I wonder how Phoebe feels about being described in a front-page caption in today’s YDN as “a girl.” Strikes me as demeaning, and doubly unfortunate given that the event was about empowerment…Doesn’t the YDN have policies about these things?
Beth, like me, is excited by this piece in the Times on the resurgence of grassroots organizing this election season. As she writes:
That’s great for democracy.
It’s also great for Democrats.
It’s always nice when the interests of the big-D and small-d (D/d)emocrats converge…
Beth argues, inter alia, that door-to-door campaigning makes it possible to customize the candidate for the voter. To which I would say, yes, with a caveat. Yes in the sense that politics in perhaps its best sense is about communities and about the harnessing of political institutions to effect tangible change in individual lives, and when Democrats fail to articulate a vision which speaks to individuals’ and communities’ circumstances and issues, they lose. As Sam Smith argued in a tremendous essay oft-cited on this site:
We got rid machines like Tammany because we came to believe in something called good government. But in throwing out the machines we also tossed out a culture and an art of politics. It is as though, in seeking to destroy the Mafia, we had determined that family values and personal loyalty were somehow by association criminal as well.
One Tammany politician, George Washington Plunkitt, claimed to know every person in his district…In the world of Plunkitt, politics was not something handed down to the people through such intermediaries as Larry King or George Will. What defined politics was an unbroken chain of human experience, memory and gratitude.
So the first non-logical but necessary thing we must do to reclaim democratic politics is to bring it back into our communities, into our hearts to bring it back home. True politics, in imitation of baseball, the great American metaphor, is also about going home.
Back in December, I chided the Times for an article in its magazine about the Dean organizing strategy which portrayed the belief of regular people that their political involvement, rather than a technocratic project, could be a natural outgrowth of concerns borne out of their personal lives as some sort of leery veureristic parallel to an Alchoholics Anonymous meeting. I’m glad to see the Times get it better this time around, and am hopeful that the rest of the Democrats are beginning to as well.
My caveat would be that crossing the line from customizing the emphasis to customizing the policy tends not to work out so well either. The one thing I’ll say for TV is that it holds candidates accountable nationally for the messages they put forward locally, and helps to curb excesses of “customization” like Lincoln’s two speeches in favor of and against racial equality while stumping on the same day. One political scientist like to compare the nationalization of political campaigns and soft drinks. Apparently, back when my parents were walking to school in the snow (uphill both ways, no doubt), patrons at individual establishments could manually set the ratios of syrup, sugar, water, and whatever the hell else goes into their cola. Once Coke became a product that was the same everywhere, it was necessary to choose a formula that would appeal to the most folks national wide. The same has happened for campaigns, as it’s no longer feasible to customize the message for each district once much of the campaign happens on national television.
The good news here is that it means candidates are responsible in one part of the country for what they tell another and so my gloss on Beth’s point would be a warning that what Kerry can’t do is spin himself on one side of the issue in California and the other in Oregon.
The bad news about the shift away from the grassroots is something I’ve railed against to no end here, but the corollary to this particular piece of good news is the bad news that Democratic candidates have responded to the nationalization of the campaign by whoring themselves out to an illusory median voter rather than bringing new voters into the process by articulating strong progressive visions for the country from New York to Arizona to Pennsylvania to Florida and beyond.
Wal-Mart Watch: Check out their latest project:
American cinephiles will soon be able to enjoy their movies without sex, violence, swearing – indeed, without any of the interesting bits. Wal-Mart, the country’s mightiest retailer, is preparing to ship a $79 DVD player that automatically strips out potentially offensive content.
The gadget, made by French-owned RCA, aims to tap into mounting concern in the US about media standards. But the self-censoring technology has run into protests from Hollywood.
…Many firms provide bowdlerised versions – not always legally – of Hollywood films, but Clearplay operates at a higher level of sophistication. Clearplay scans movies for dodgy content, and then programs that data into its system. Subscribers can then watch standard copies of the 500-or-so films on its list, with the assurance that they will automatically skip over mute anything that children or the squeamish may not like.
NYU tries to weaken the nation’s first private University graduate student union by replacing its graduate students with casual labor in the form of…other graduate students:
NYU has come under fire from its graduate students union for hiring grad students from Columbia University and calling them adjuncts, a tactic that the union says lets the university pay Columbia students less for doing work usually done by unionized NYU students.
United Auto Workers Local 2110 filed a grievance with NYU’s Office of Labor Relations Jan. 15, claiming that the positions being filled by the Columbia grad students, who make no more than $4,000 at NYU, should have been given to NYU grad students, who would be making between $12,000 and $17,000.
…While union representatives acknowledged that NYU has a right to determine who it employ, they said NYU is “outsourcing” teaching jobs at a greater rate than in the past. “This is the first time they seem to be doing this at this level and scope,” said Sudhir Mahadevan, unit chair for Local 2110.
The creeping specter of economic justice strikes close to home:
Nearly 100 staffers from The Wall Street Journal picketed the newspaper’s headquarters in New York Wednesday as relations with the company’s main union turned increasingly tense. The protest lasted just under an hour and was aimed at pressuring the company ahead of the next bargaining session, which is scheduled for April 14. The newspaper’s employees have been working without a contract for a year.
Besides the picketing, most of the newspaper’s reporters at the New York headquarters showed up for work at about 1:30 p.m. as part of a work-to-rule job action. The union’s contract calls for a 35-hour work week, but the reporters often put in far longer hours. E.S. Browning, a stock market reporter with 25 years’ experience at the paper, said that the normally collegial atmosphere at the Journal between reporters and management was breaking down, particularly since the company was seeking cutbacks in health care coverage at the same time that top managers were receiving large pay increases.
We may see just how much the Journal’s management knows about management.
I’m yet to run into anyone on this campus who supports Yale’s History Department’s decision to deny junior professor Mary Habeck tenure. Several people have pet theories about why it happened and what it demonstrates – that Yale discriminates against women, that Yale discriminates against conservatives, and so forth. What this demonstrates most compellingly, though, is that Yale’s ongoing casualization of its academic labor force is contrary to the best interests of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates alike. I’ve never met or studied with Habeck, but I’ve heard only good things about her from students, all of whom are poorly served by a system which transfers more and more work from ladder faculty to transient professors and graduate teaching assistants. As “Blackboard Blues” demonstrated, a real concern with undergraduate teaching should translate into institutional support for transient and graduate teachers who do 70% of the teaching here, and into an expansion of the ranks of ladder faculty. Mary Habeck, it seems, is the latest casualty of Yale’s failure to follow that advice.
Josh Eidelson 